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FEMA program helps Keansburg clean up

Video: Keansburg homes damaged by Hurricane Sandy getting demolishedIt has been 10 months since Hurricane Sandy tore through New Jersey. In Keansburg, there still are remnants of the storm's destructive forces. An estimated 1,700 homes were affected. There are currently 41 houses scheduled for demolition, and that number is expected to rise. Just a few blocks away at the amusement park, it seems like business as usual. The hope for Keansburg residents is that they can follow suit. (Video by Andre Malok/The Star-Ledger)

'This will help us get more modern houses that are built to code up and replace some of the older structures.' Raymond O’Hare, borough manager.

The amusement park is back up, and the water park is busy. Keansburg’s most visible attractions are drawing good crowds these days. School buses of day campers lined Beachway last week as hundreds of kids scaled the steps of the Runaway Rapids and spilled down the twisting slides with thrill-screams and laughter.

But just a half-mile away, there is a different kind of frenetic energy. Crews are wrecking houses. As diesel engines growl, the hydraulic arms of an excavator raise the steel grappling claw high in the air, then slam it down into a place where people’s memories were once made.

And just like that, in the sharp, cracking din of splintering wood, a home is reduced to a pile of sticks and shingles, waiting to be scooped up by front-end loaders and dropped into waiting container trucks.

Ten months after Sandy left half of Keansburg’s 3,300 homes temporarily uninhabitable — yes, half — a $700,000 FEMA-backed demolition program is underway to remove many of those that proved beyond repair. The grant will pay for removal of the first 44 houses, and Keansburg officials hope to get funding for a second round.

In all, there are about 100 homes in Keansburg that await the excavator and officials hope there is FEMA money to take them all down.

The grant money will save homeowners between $15,000 to $20,000, the cost of tearing down their homes, which just might save the Keansburg neighborhoods. Because once their wrecked homes are gone, that $15,000 or $20,000 can go to rebuilding. And maybe, someday, life can return to normal. Or maybe better than normal.

Video: Time lapse of house demolition in KeansburgWatch as a house on Bayview Avenue in Keansburg gets torn down in this 25 second time lapse video. Around 1,700 homes were affected by flooding following Hurricane Sandy in late October 2012. Currently, 41 houses are scheduled for demolition. (Video by Andre Malok/The Star-Ledger)

“This will help us get more modern houses that are built to code up and replace some of the older structures,” said Raymond O’Hare, the borough manager.

The demolitions began last week, with the contractor taking down two or three houses a day. Streets are blocked off with orange cones, and crews move in with the excavator. Sometimes the homeowners and neighbors come to watch and tears are shed.

One home demolished belonged to Joan Bonner, who had lived there for over 40 years. She won’t be rebuilding. The house will have to be raised too high to meet new flood insurance requirements.
“I’m worried about all the steps,” she said. “I’m too old for all those stairs. It’s hard to leave, but it doesn’t make sense for me to stay.”

Her house is at the intersection of Twilight and Beaconlight avenues, and there’s a metaphor in that for Keansburg turning the corner.

Of the first dozen homes taken down, “10 or 11 (families) are committed to rebuilding here,” said Fran Mullan, the town’s consulting engineer who works for T&M Associates in Middletown.

“I think it’s giving people a shot in the arm” said O’Hare, a lifelong resident. “People are seeing something being done, they’re saying, ‘We finally got someone to help us.’ "

Like neighboring Union Beach, Keansburg is a one-square-mile, blue-collar town of primary home owners. It has a history as a beach town — a breezy place on the Raritan Bay where steamboats would cross New York harbor and drop off New Yorkers for one-day excursions or stays in the cottages near the waterfront. But the completion of the Parkway in the 1955 made the Atlantic Coast more accessible, and the Bayshore cottages became affordable, expandable year-round homes.

Like Union Beach, Keansburg juts out into the Raritan Bay like a camel’s hump, and its northeastern face absorbed Sandy’s hardest punch, both in wind and waves.

A map in borough hall shows severely flooded areas in yellow; half the town is colored in. The blocks behind the amusement park are still checkerboards of vacancy. Red stickers or spray-painted X’s mark the condemned homes.

“It’s been brutal,” said Dennis O’Keefe, the town’s public works boss. “I’d say there are about 500 people still out of their homes.”

Like O’Hare, and Mayor Art Boden, O’Keefe is a lifelong resident. And, like them, he has “eight or nine” vacant homes right on his block.

But Boden says the shock has finally worn off, and the town is poised to recover.
“We’re a hardworking blue-collar town. It’s a tough town.”